[Argh!] Where the heck is auto-save when you need one?

[Kasey Chang]

Was playing the budget game Hot Rod: American Street Drag from Canopy / Valusoft (the people who brought you Midnight Outlaw Street Drag, and I was an Atomic Mutant!)

Just started fresh this morning, started a new "profile" (i.e. new game), just figured out that I have to buy cars, strip them, keep the parts I *want*, and sell the rest. Keep doing this and I'll make money enough to put together my dream car.

So I proceed to do so... Bought one car at a time, stripped them and sold each part separately, kept the parts that are in excellent (90-95% condition) and after a couple hours... have enough parts to put together my Camaro, with custom glossy clearcoat and decals... and quite a few options, worth at least 15K. In between, must have bought and stripped about 20+ cars. This baby can do quarter mile in under 12 seconds (hit 11.1 sec once).

Was just about to upgrade the engine a little more when the program suddenly minimized and the desktop popped up. Huh? Then Norton System Doctor started running, and I remember that I did set it to run 12PM, every 1st of month in scheduler.

So I cancelled it, exitted it, and brought up the game again.

D3D render error. Program will now exit.

Argh!

Start the program up... Nope, no joy. Shut down and restart.

Open the program up again... Ack! My progress was NOT SAVED at all! In the Canopy games, you must exit back to Profile Screen, and save the profile in order to save your progress.

FOUR HOURS completely wasted. ACK!

Why don't more games have auto-saves?

[Freezer-TPF-]

Your problem is that you are running Norton System Doctor. *cringe*

[Kasey Chang]

NSD and Norton Utilities are the reason I never had to reformat my Win98 system in FIVE YEARS. The system runs great, no excess registry entires, etc. It's all nice and trim.